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They may recognize themselves in what you're writing, and then they have to say, Well, she doesn't see me as I see myself. All a writer has is her own experience, and that experience comes out of human relationships.
Vivian Gornick
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Vivian Gornick
Age: 89
Born: 1935
Born: June 14
Critic
Essayist
Historian
Memoirist
The Bronx
New York City
Well
Writer
Writing
Comes
Experience
Doesn
May
Wells
Human
Relationships
Humans
Recognize
More quotes by Vivian Gornick
The point of women's liberation is not to stand at the door of the male world, beating our fists, and crying, 'Let me in, damn you, let me in!' The point is to walk away from the world and concentrate on creating a new woman.
Vivian Gornick
Adorable in her not-very-bright submissiveness, charming in her childlike delight in shiny floors, even forgivable in her spiteful competition for the whitest, brightest wash, Madison Avenue's girl-next door is all the American male could wish for: unless, by some miscarriage, he should fancy human companionship.
Vivian Gornick
What Independence Has Come to Mean to Me: The Pain of Solitude. The Pleasure of Self-Knowledge
Vivian Gornick
a scientist or a writer is one who ruminates continuously on the nature of physical or imaginative life, experiences repeated relief and excitement when the insight comes, and is endlessly attracted to working out the idea.
Vivian Gornick
Before I knew that I was Jewish or a girl I knew that I was a member of the working class. At a time when I had not yet grasped the significance of the fact that in my house English was a second language, or that I wore dresses while my brother wore pants, I knew--and I knew it was important to know--that Papa worked hard all day long.
Vivian Gornick
I don't write fiction but I do write narrative I write memoirs that I treat like stories, so whenever I'm using somebody I actually know as a model, I am submitting them to the agenda of a storyteller, and I feel free to do what I want.
Vivian Gornick
... the whole sickening trickery in life -- the idea that one cannot fight for one's humanity without, ironically, losing it ... that trickery is the real enemy and the very essence of the thing we must continually be on our guard against.
Vivian Gornick
Everyone longs for expressiveness. That's why love carries so much weight. Because so many lives are without other means of expressiveness.
Vivian Gornick
The memoirist, like the poet and the novelist, must engage the world, because engagement makes experience, experience makes wisdom, and finally it's the wisdom-or rather the movement toward it-that counts.
Vivian Gornick
When cafe life thrives, talk is a shared limberness of the mind that improves appetite for conversation: an adequate sentence maker is then made good, a good one excellent, an excellent one extraordinary.
Vivian Gornick
Sex is the killer. Sexual love makes you feel more vulnerable than any other kind of love. That's one reason that people are so thorny and so vulnerable and so easily wounded when in love.
Vivian Gornick
Love can't be a metaphor anymore. If you try to make literature out of it, it doesn't work.
Vivian Gornick
When I work I feel more alive than under any other circumstances. There's not an 'I love you' in the world that can match it. I feel safe, excited, at peace, erotic, centered. Nothing can touch me.
Vivian Gornick
Awareness of the self is more acutely at the heart of things than it has ever been before. On the foundation of self-awareness alone rest all our hopes for a new politics, a new society, a revitalized life. If we do not genuinely know ourselves, the void will now, at last, surely rise up to meet us.
Vivian Gornick
For the integrated human being there is no past: there is only the continual transformation of original experience.
Vivian Gornick
The desire for narration keeps on reasserting itself, so that since modernism and fiction brought narration to an end, it is sought in memoirs.
Vivian Gornick
Women occupy, in great masses, the 'household tasks' of industry. They are nurses but not doctors, secretaries but not executives, researchers but not writers, workers but not managers, bookkeepers but not promoters.
Vivian Gornick
We cannot depend on change, but we can depend on surprise. However, we cannot always depend on surprise either. This keeps us on our toes.
Vivian Gornick
The difference between me in my work and the me who is here in front of you is that on the page I create a consistency, a voice that must sound really reliable whereas in person I am free - obviously! - to sound every which way.
Vivian Gornick
Emotional sympathies just dry up and die as we change, and they are as mysterious in friendship as in love. It's a relationship like any other.
Vivian Gornick
